Oh. Whoopee. Another Norstat (link to tables). With the Sunday Times (link to original writeup). Groundbreaking. Far be it from me to turn my nose up some Scottish polling, but we’ve basically had a Norstat-Survation back-and-forth for the past few months. At this point, I am practically begging people to commission YouGov, Savanta or Ipsos. We haven’t heard from any of those previously regular pollsters in Scotland since the General Election, and whilst some polling is better than none, the fewer pollsters we have in the mix at any given time, the less able we are to smooth out their individual quirks of methodology.
The previous Norstat covered the 30th of October – 1st of November 2024. Changes are shown as (vs that poll / vs last election).
Regional Vote
Even as Labour charted an upwards trend earlier this year, I was often to be found pointing out change between polls was within margin of error and so caution was required. That is not the case here, at least for the top two. Although still down about a fifth of their vote compared to 2021, the SNP recover enough to pull back into the 30’s, whilst Labour slump even further to end up no further ahead of where they were back then.
More within the margin of error territory but still perhaps indicative, the Conservatives are also up a couple of points, which puts them within touching distance of re-overtaking Labour. Not far behind again are Reform, who are up a point, as are the Lib Dems. The Greens are down a point, joining Labour in the “same as 2021” club, and Norstat continue to be inexplicably Alba-strong and have them up two points to a level I will eat not just my hat but a whole milliner’s worth if the post-Salmond party actually achieve in 2026.
Constituency Vote
It’s a pretty similar story over on the constituency vote, with the SNP-Labour gap widening, to a level that it becomes hard to imagine Labour making many gains on at all. By contrast to the proportional vote the Conservatives are actually down a single point here, as are the Greens, with the only other change being a similarly sized uptick for Reform. I have to admit my model isn’t really accounting for Reform in constituencies very well just yet, but that may be a Christmas break tweak to the system.
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
I thought the previous Norstat was dramatic, but this is even more so. This comes out with a narrow majority for the SNP and Greens, abandoned though their formal partnership may be, at 66 to 63 for the other parties, of which one would be that entirely Norstat hallucinated Alba MSP, adding one to the Independence tally. This is the first poll since a traditionally SNP-friendly Ipsos in January to project to an SNP-Green majority.
On the other hand, this is shockingly bad for Labour, in large part because of how wide the constituency gap is. I last had a poll worse than this for them in November 2021, and they last had a single-digit seat lead over the Conservatives in September last year. It’s also only the fifth time, out of 85 polls in my tracker, that I’ve had Labour with fewer seats than they won in 2021.
That’s also, ironically enough, why the Greens end up on a joint-worst seat projection of the term here. Proportionally speaking they are entitled to 10 MSPs, but Labour completely collapsing again means the SNP absolutely wreck the proportionality through excessive constituency wins.
Possible Majorities
Note: these majorities relate simply to passing a vote in the Scottish Parliament. They do not imply the formation of a full coalition government.
- Traffic Light: Labour, Lib Dem and Green
- Independence Bloc: SNP, Green and Alba
- Grand Coalition: SNP and Labour
- Union Bloc: Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Reform UK
The fact that it’s not the SNP recovering but Labour collapsing driving the former’s projected Holyrood success is made all the more clear on the Westminster side of things. In the space of just five months, Norstat reckon Labour to have gone from 35% to just 20% of the vote, or what would be their second-worst Scottish share in the modern democratic era. Whilst I still reckon Norstat might be over-estimating the scale of Labour decline, the direction of travel being sharply downwards will be a cause for concern for all those new MPs.
Nobody else has any change outwith the margin of error. That does nonetheless give Reform their best share yet in Scotland, and the first time they’ve pulled into third place ahead of the Conservatives, even if it’s a statistical tie. I’m now bracing for a possible Reform UK in second place poll next year if this keeps up, which will be absolutely jaw-dropping if it does occur and will be a nuclear bomb in our national political discourse.
The drama continues with the constitutional question giving the first genuine lead for Independence since the last Ipsos in June. It’s also the highest figure since November last year, and actually the only pollster besides typically Yes-favourable Ipsos and FindOutNow to have it on a majority of the vote even before excluding Don’t Knows.
I know I keep saying it, but I wasn’t wrong: the SNP losing one election has not, in fact, killed Independence stone stead. It remains a serious, and to many attractive, prospect. Whilst it’s entirely possible this poll is an outlier, you’d be daft to dismiss it entirely, and equally so if you take it as gospel. The question remains fundamentally unsettled, and you’re (both sides) going to have to do more than hoping your opponents bungle things.
Hypotheticals
As ever, the last little bit of analysis concerns those hypothetical and more proportional voting systems that BBS likes to play about with. The use of pure FPTP at Westminster is an affront to democracy, and though Holyrood fares far better, AMS is still deeply imperfect. The examples here simply transpose the poll findings onto more proportional voting systems – the reality is that different systems would of course result in different voter behaviour.
Scandinavian Style Westminster
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